Eventualities
by imperfectly
Summary: Eric, Sydney, Casablanca, and what was bound to happen. SWeiss. Companion to How It Happened


Eventualities  
  
Rating: PG-13  
  
Summary: Eric, Sydney, Casablanca, and what was bound to happen. SWeiss. Companion to How It Happened  
  
Spoilers: S3, but mostly AU  
  
Ship: Syd/Weiss  
  
Disclaimer: I don't own Alias, Casablanca, Bugs Bunny, or anything else.  
  
Author's note: This is a companion piece, Weiss POV and slightly longer, for my fic How It Happened. It isn't really necessary to read that one first, but it would probably help. If you can't stand anything other than SV, this isn't the fic for you. Reviews are appreciated. Extra thanks to my beta Martine.  
  
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *  
  
He caught himself thinking about her at all the wrong times, in all the wrong ways. She was beautiful, of course. She was fragile, in the way that spiders' webs can inescapably trap a fly or frame a dozen raindrops without flinching, but crumble in upon themselves when one strand of webbing loses its grip. It made him think that if he held her too tightly, she just might come undone.  
  
She was also, for many reasons, unattainable.  
  
All these things (well, more accurately, everything she was) made it simply an eventuality that he would fall in love with her.  
  
The dreams started the night after he saw her, somehow alive, for the first time. The misty feeling of her hand on his arm, the unclear translation of a smile through the haze of sleep, and barely anything more. Somehow, he knew that there was meant to be a kiss somewhere in the meantime that he missed.  
  
Dreams, Eric, (he told himself), are never what happens in the real world.  
  
There were a few weeks, when she was at her real lowest, that he was her ultimate. He helped her move in, cooked for her, amused her wildly with his slapstick comedy, took enough shots with her to make him forget why exactly he wasn't allowed to touch her, and bought her a ridiculously expensive book.  
  
His generosity and wittiness and loving care were repaid with her endless urge to relive the past. Every time he got close to bringing back the old Sydney, she would find some way to dredge some Vaughn-related memory out of her severely disturbed head and ruin his progress.  
  
Sometimes he just felt like screaming at her, "Guess what, Sydney? He got married. He has a wife. You need to stop dwelling. Maybe you should take a look at who's really here for you, huh? Who are your real friends? Who really loves you?"  
  
But before he would let himself, he had to try (just one more time) to make her smile her secret smile by singing his favorite aria from "Carmen" or "La Traviata." So he tried that, tried cooking her more dinner, tried cracking jokes about her spotless bathroom, tried silently offering her his arms whenever Vaughn left her stricken and alone in the debrief room. He mostly didn't try to shock her back to reality, and she mostly didn't mind.  
  
Her constant, adoring attention disappeared as soon as Vaughn's devotion resurfaced. Another eventuality. Fate, it seemed, only wished to use poor pathetic Eric as a plot device. A weak plot device, at that.  
  
As they lost touch, he could see her drowning. The waters of her old identity and her old (still kicking) love were steadily building a nice deep pool for her. They really didn't need to try very hard: this was a girl with enough metaphorical leg chains to sink her ten feet deep in the desert. Eric could see it killing her. Hell, he could hear it killing her. After all, the walls were thin and he lived next door.  
  
The incident that finally shocked him enough to make him yell was when he walked in on her, in her bathroom, cutting her arm and sobbing uncontrollably. He just wasn't expecting to see such horrible self- inflicted mutilation from a woman who was usually so strong. Frankly, he would have been less surprised to find her doing lines of cocaine.  
  
Regardless, he had to do something (and yelling was as good a place to start as any). He had too much secondhand experience with this kind of self-destruction to allow his best friend to fall victim to it. And even though it dredged up the agonizing memories of Lisa (the blood, her mother weeping on the telephone, the medication that finally ended it), he got through it with the knowledge that it didn't have to happen to Sydney.  
  
That night was spent dissecting her life in bitter detail. He shared his knowledge of addiction to pain with her, and she shared what she had really been thinking during all those missions with Vaughn.  
  
That night made it almost all better.  
  
Except, of course, for the tiny little fact that it made him fall completely, beyond the point-of-no-return in love with her.  
  
This was no new thing to Eric Weiss. The whole "unrequited love" thing had been done before, many a time. In fact, his ardor had very rarely been requited.  
  
Didn't make it any less painful.  
  
He would have been able to cope with it, would have made no move on a vulnerable woman who obviously needed a friend, would have been the perfect gentleman. In his head, he swears that he could've controlled himself, if late nights and her presence hadn't gotten in the way.  
  
He blames it on Casablanca. The night that she fell asleep, so obviously in his arms, he sat on her couch, afraid to move. He was afraid to disturb her, even to shift his knee from its cramped corner, because she felt so enticingly real. That movie always put him in the kind of mood where he couldn't stand not to be with someone. He wanted so desperately to have someone to hold after that last line "Maybe not now, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life."  
  
It made him think about what he regretted.  
  
Had Sydney been awake, she could have heard him whispering along with Humphrey Bogart before the credits began to roll. Even earlier, she could have heard him whispering the lines (about fighting the good fight and the destiny of love) that seemed so fitting for their situation.  
  
Finally, he resigned himself to the fact that movement was inevitable. He began to sit up, to gently shift her to the empty couch cushion.  
  
"Syd, I need to go home now. My apartment. You know, where I live," he mumbled into her hair. He winced at hearing his words, which sounded so harsh against the humming appliances and dim lights. She slightly shifted, but refused to wake up. He tried again, with words he only half intended her to hear.  
  
"Syd, I can't do this. I can't have you fall asleep in my arms."  
  
"But why?" And that was the last thing he could take. Her sleepy smile, full of mischief and protests, twisted his heart right out of his chest. He answered honestly, for all that he knew he might regret it later.  
  
"Because that's not how it works. I'm the best friend, Syd, and the girl never goes for the best friend in real life. And I can't take it. I can't take meaning so little to you, of all people."  
  
Which is when she woke up. And stared at him with the kind of look that told him, "You are so much more than anyone's best friend." And then, somehow, they were kissing.  
  
A sleepy, slow, reassuring kind of kiss that lasted (not long enough) only until Sydney proclaimed Love and went to sleep.  
  
Of course, this made his life beautiful. Far from perfect (as exemplified in the stony silences in the elevator with Vaughn and the threatening stance of Jack Bristow), but close enough to make him work at it.  
  
After they finally vanquished all their demons in the intelligence world, after he bought her an ugly sweater and she repaid him in so much more than kisses, after they started a little family with the two of them and a fish named Platypus, she moved with him to Santa Clara.  
  
Eventually, Eric got it through his head that she was it. He knew that they would be forever sometime between their first Bugs Bunny cartoon on his couch and their first ice cream cone in Santa Clara.  
  
He knew it somewhere around the time she got him to dance to "Billie Jean" in public, when he realized that he did it for the sake of the smile and raging giggles she let loose when he tried to moonwalk.  
  
He knew because whenever she left a room, it was empty. It didn't matter how many actual physical bodies were in it with him, it was still empty. Like the utter stillness of the woods when it's snowing, or a cold abandoned room. Without her presence, there wasn't enough to leave a trace.  
  
So after enough inner dialogue to drive a psychiatrist crazy, he went looking for a ring. He lost his courage a good ten times before the night he dropped to one knee (quite clumsily) and asked her for her forever (again quite clumsily, and some of his words came from a Ben Harper song, but it didn't really matter).  
  
He was kinda surprised when she said yes.  
  
He was also slightly surprised, ten months later, to wake up and see her still wearing her engagement ring.  
  
He was even a bit, just a bit, surprised to watch her walk down the aisle and not run away or accidentally say "Vaughn" instead of "Eric."  
  
But, in the end, this wedding was their eventuality, and he stopped being surprised. 


End file.
